Persistence Pays Off

Featured Author:

Molly Seltzer

My full name is Mary Rebecca Wilkinson Seltzer, but Iâ€™ve been called Molly since I can remember. I grew up on a beef cattle farm in the mountains of Virginia, right on the West Virginia line. I am an anthropology and Spanish double major with an English minor at the University of Virginia.
I joined the newspaper my second year and became an arts and entertainment writer. Mostly, I write about music, but I have experience with hard news stories, features, other A&E subjects like theater and literature and â€“ in a particularly daring momentâ€“ a short series on economic and financial issues.
Iâ€™ve had an unabashed affair with wordplay my whole life. I love puns, love them. I also overuse parentheses and have an unexplainable affection for hyphens.
Roald Dahl, Max Schulman and P.G. Wodehouse are my favorite authors. Recently, Iâ€™ve been reading a lot of E.B. White and A.J. Liebling. (It seems many great writers shorten their names; I consider it an unfortunate twist of fate that my initials are M.R. Seltzer.)
I like to live the high life â€¦ you know, polishing silver and licking envelopes. I go to a lot of concerts, which helps me make a lot of friends. I often bake, which helps me keep them. Iâ€™m an avid sports fan and root for the Redskins, the Pacers and the Pirates â€“ mainly because they need it. I take great pleasure in writing letters to family members and friends in faraway places. It is unclear whether they are ever opened.
Iâ€™m excited to share my thoughts (discerning), insights (considerable) and experiences (enthralling) throughout this process.
And â€¦ I ask you to bear with me.

More articles from this author:

This week I’m going to write about persimmons. Oh yes, that most noble of fruits. No, hang on, that’s wrong. You’ll have to excuse me (well, you don’t have to, but it’d be a very generous move on your part). I’m graduating from college on Sunday and my brain’s just about full to capacity. Bet you didn’t know that could happen. It can. So don’t fill up your headspace with all those song lyrics, ok?

This week’s column, my last, is about persistence. My college career has been peppered with situations in which I had to just get through things, without complaining or ignoring the situation. The instances range from the serious — when I was a varsity athlete with asthma — to the trivial — my housemate’s sub-optimal hygiene habits.

I haven’t experienced the real world yet, but I figure persistence is going to continue to be a theme in life. Like watching cooking shows. That will probably be a theme too.

If things don’t go your way, sometimes you can change the circumstances and sometimes you can’t. The second option takes an entirely different skill set than the first. (Did you notice that term, “skill set?” That’s the kind of talk we graduates use. If someone had said those words to me my first year I would have thought they were talking about matching silverware.) Things don’t break your way and there are times you can’t get away from a bad situation, so you just have to persevere.

I’m not really prone to feeling sorry for myself, but I found that the less I complained about a situation, the easier it was to get through. I might mention an unpleasant experience to a friend; I might even mention it in what some would call a whiny voice. But to anyone directly involved — a coworker or boss — I kept my mouth shut. Don’t advertise your unhappiness. The few times I was uncomfortable in a workplace and kept my complaints to myself — they weren’t constructive, but personal annoyances — my actions ended up benefiting me through cool promotions, glowing letters of recommendation and so on.

College is designed to teach you to be persistent. Every student wants to befriend the great teachers, so you have to stand out academically and in personality. You’re separated from your family and hometown. You might not like your roommate, your resident advisor, your academic advisor, your lunchlady … Unless you’re lucky, there will be required classes you have to take and you may hate them. You may have to work a job that you dislike. The bad news is that most of these things can’t be changed without a lot of stress and effort on everyone’s part. The good news is they all have a time limit.

Persistence takes a certain mindset (different from a skill set, but nearly as useful). Think of your trials and tribulations as mountains: They’re high, they’re serious and they’re unpleasant to go through, but a finite number of steps will get you over them. Every day the end comes closer, so chin up. Be tough and resilient and the persimmons of your labors will come to you.

Thank you for reading this year and for sending me your thoughts. I’ll be at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in the fall, so keep your eyes peeled for more parentheses, more puns and a lot more of my writing!